Powerful new Big Sean video shows effect of violence on black boy

A powerful new music video by rapper Big Sean shows the effect of gun violence on a black child.

The slow-moving, black-and-white video, released Friday, accompanies the ballad “One Man Can Change the World,” a track on Sean’s album Dark Sky Paradise. The song features vocals by John Legend and Kanye West, neither of whom appears in the video.

Co-directed by Andrew Hines and Jeff Powers, the video features a young, black boy who sees evocative images of violence on a TV, bullets falling to the ground, funerals, and coffins. In one scene, the boy walks past riot police and grazes their shields with his hand.

The video debuted on Juneteenth, a day celebrated annually to commemorate the end of slavery in the U.S., and just two days after the tragic massacre of nine African-Americans by a white man in Charleston, South Carolina.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Sean says the song and video were made for his late grandmother Mildred V. Leonard. “She was the backbone of the family, for sure,” Sean said. “She was born in West Virginia, she came up from nothing, she was one of the first female black captains in World War II, and she was a female police officer in Detroit. She was a teacher, and a counselor.”